


If you're thinking of leaving (you're leaving at a very bad time)

by pellucid



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 13:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1228858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Playing with how it might have played out if "Heroes" had gone another way. Character death (not the canonical one), angst, sadness, the beginning of the end of my hardcore Daniel/Janet shipping days. Specific spoilers for "Crystal Skull," "Heroes," "Lost City," "New Order," and "Threads"; story set in season 10, but no spoilers other than casting</p>
<p>Written in April 2007.</p>
    </blockquote>





	If you're thinking of leaving (you're leaving at a very bad time)

**Author's Note:**

> Playing with how it might have played out if "Heroes" had gone another way. Character death (not the canonical one), angst, sadness, the beginning of the end of my hardcore Daniel/Janet shipping days. Specific spoilers for "Crystal Skull," "Heroes," "Lost City," "New Order," and "Threads"; story set in season 10, but no spoilers other than casting
> 
> Written in April 2007.

***

_Present Day_

Daniel always knew it would take a death to bring her back to town. Sometimes he'd catch himself wondering whose: Teal'c's, Sam's, his own. In the end, it was a death, but not one he'd anticipated. 

He wasn't quite surprised when she showed up to Nick Ballard's funeral, but seeing her again was a shock. During the graveside service he stole glances at her, familiar and distant and backlit by the late afternoon sun, and he dared hope she had been looking for an excuse to come back.

***

He didn't think of his grandfather much. He had spent the majority of his life intentionally not thinking of Nick, so even after their reconciliation, Daniel found the habit persisted. In the intervening years, his grandfather became merely one of a number of people Daniel worked to forget.

Six and a half years after SG-1 left him with the giant aliens, Nicholas Ballard came home to die. 

Advanced colon cancer, Dr. Lam told Daniel, as he watched the pain-stricken, delirious old man, whose face was as pale as the infirmary sheets. He hadn't seen someone die slowly and up close in a while, and he couldn't remember if Nick's labored breathing was unusual or if that's just what happens when you die. 

He had notebooks for Daniel, Nick kept repeating. But he had come through the 'gate with only the clothes on his back.

Daniel sat with him for five days, Sam and Teal'c taking occasional turns while Daniel rested, Mitchell and Vala hovering nearby. He tried, over and over in Nick's lucid moments, to apologize for abandoning him, the weight of the guilt sticking in Daniel's throat among excuses he wasn't allowed to use: Goa'uld, Replicators, and Ori; death, life, ascensions and heartbreaks. His grandfather would laugh weakly and pat his hand, neither accusing nor absolving. 

Nick remembered Sam and Teal'c and accepted their presence. He asked about Jack, and Daniel was surprised at how easy it was to explain Jack's death, all that pain faded to a dull ache. In the quiet times Dr. Lam came to adjust the dose of pain medication. 

"Daniel," Nick asked once, as she retreated, "what happened to the other doctor? That lovely woman who was so worried when you were missing."

He thought of Janet leaving, blamed himself for driving her away. "She doesn't work here anymore," he said evenly, and he clenched his fists only a little and almost looked Nick in the eye.

"That is too bad," Nick replied sleepily. "I liked her."

He died in his sleep the morning of the sixth day, Daniel and Dr. Lam watching the monitors go flat. Daniel ran a hand over the three days' worth of stubble on his face and stumbled into the hall where Sam was waiting. She caught him in a hug and held on tight while Daniel buried his face in her neck, breathed in the familiar scent of her shampoo, and wondered why losing forgotten people still hurt so much.

***

Hours later, Sam looked up to find him standing distractedly just inside the door of her lab. She was glad to see that he had showered and shaved, but he still had the haunted look in his eyes. He'd worn that look for years, and she couldn't remember when it started: when Janet left, when Jack died, possibly even he descended the first time. But it hadn't been this bad in a while.

"Hey," she said, closing the lid of her laptop. "How are you holding up?" 

He shrugged. "I, uh, was hoping you'd do me a favor." He wasn't making eye contact, instead looking around the room, pacing a little.

"Sure," she answered without hesitating and watched as he picked up a physics monograph and flipped the pages unseeing. She wanted to ask him to sit.

"Can you—" Now he looked up and studied her face. "Can you call Janet? Invite her to the funeral? I think Nick would have wanted her there."

Sam could feel her eyebrows shoot up with surprise. Of all the favors Daniel might have asked, she didn't expect this. "I—are you sure?" He hadn't mentioned Janet in almost two years. 

Daniel sighed heavily. "I don't know. He asked about her. And I thought maybe…" He put down the book and began pacing again. "You know, actually, don't bother. Or…just don't tell me if you call her or not, and that way if she doesn't come…" He waved a hand uselessly in the air, then walked out the door.

"Daniel," Sam called after him. He didn't turn back.

***

_Two Years Before_

Sam dutifully took the framed photographs off the wall and wrapped them in bubble paper. Seven years' worth of Cassie's school pictures. Janet's parents, siblings, nieces and nephew. There were blank spaces on the wall, and she tried not to remember the photos that belonged there: a snapshot of SG-1 at one of Janet's Christmas parties, Cassie and the Colonel playing street hockey, Daniel standing behind Janet with his arms around her.

"I think I've got the kitchen done," Janet announced wearily as she joined Sam in the hall. 

"That's good," Sam replied absently, without meaning it. Nothing had been good for months.

"I—" Janet began, and then stopped.

"You're sorry?" Sam ventured. "You think it was all a mistake? That I should start unpacking, and call General Hammond to put in a good word for your reinstatement, and tell Daniel to get his ass back over here?" Her voice was flat, the bitterness having drained out sometime in the past few weeks when she wasn't paying attention.

Janet leaned heavily against the now bare wall. "No," she said softly. "It's not a mistake. I can't do this anymore, Sam. I can't."

Sam nodded. "I know." 

She knew now, but she hadn't noticed at first. In the weeks and months after the Colonel's death, everyone was fraying at the edges. When she had begun to notice—Janet's silences, Daniel's growing detachment—she'd chalked it up to grief, Janet's injury, literal and metaphorical scars that were taking longer than usual to heal. 

When Daniel came home with the knowledge of the Ancients downloaded into his brain, Sam misread Janet's reaction as the usual professional mask. A week later she led her friend to the chamber in Antarctica where Daniel was frozen and watched something shatter, pieces of Janet falling like thousands of icicles into the snow, and Sam realized it was different this time. 

Sam laid the last photo in the box on top of the others, then caught her friend's hand, pulled her into a hug. "You better keep in touch, you hear?" she said fiercely, blinking back tears.

***

_Present Day_

The wake was a small event held at Colonel Carter's home. Nicholas Ballard had no family other than Daniel Jackson, so the attendees were all employees of the SGC. 

Teal'c left Colonel Mitchell, Vala Mal Doran, and Sergeant Harriman in animated conversation about the projected fortunes of the Chicago Cubs and entered the kitchen to retrieve another beer. The figure standing by the French doors, looking into the darkness of the backyard, started at his entrance. 

"Forgive me for disturbing you, Doctor Fraiser," he apologized, going to the refrigerator.

"Oh, no, Teal'c, you're not disturbing me," she replied, coming toward him and laying a hand on his elbow. "It's so good to see you." Her voice was soft and a little thick with emotion.

Teal'c nodded his agreement. "It is good to see you, as well." She leaned against the cabinets, staying close, and Teal'c realized that she was in fact grateful to have her solitude interrupted. "How is Cassandra?" he asked, casting for a topic of conversation.

She smiled, and he remembered the reassurance of that smile, missed it. "She's good," Doctor Fraiser answered. "She still likes Berkeley, and she's doing well with her studies. She's busy. I don't see her as much as I'd like."

Teal'c recognized the loneliness behind her eyes and thought of Ry'ac. "It is difficult to watch a child grow into adulthood."

"Yes, it is," she agreed. "I mean, it's good, and I'm so proud of her, but sometimes I just wish we could all go back…" She trailed off and looked around the kitchen. "Sam painted," she said after a long pause. "I like the color."

Teal'c looked at the walls which Colonel Carter had not asked him to help paint. Teal'c had returned from Dakara one evening and come to her home with Chinese takeout to find her furniture pushed to the middle of the living room, sheets of plastic covering the carpets. They worked through the night, painting the living room sage green and the kitchen this soft yellow, not discussing the absence of Pete Shanahan or Jacob Carter or Daniel Jackson, finishing the second coat as the sun rose. 

"I shouldn't have come, Teal'c," Doctor Fraiser broke the silence of his memory. "I don't know what I was thinking. I knew it was a bad idea, but Sam said—"

"That Daniel Jackson wished you to come," Teal'c finished.

She snorted softly. "He hasn't spoken two words to me. He doesn't want me here." Teal'c decided not to point out the flaw in her reasoning. "Besides," she continued, her face pensive and concerned, "he's so different. I can't put my finger on it, but something has changed. I don't recognize him anymore."

Teal'c thought of the Ancients and the Ori and Vala Mal Doran and Colonel Mitchell and everything else he could not explain to her, not merely because she lacked security clearance.

"I am glad you have come, Janet Fraiser," he said instead. "And I believe Daniel Jackson is as well." 

***

_Two and a Half Years Before_

Daniel Jackson was already quite intoxicated, but Teal'c said nothing as his friend took the bottle of whisky from Major Carter and swallowed a mouthful. He made a face, his eyes watering a little, before passing the bottle to Teal'c. Without a symbiote, Teal'c was free to consume alcohol, yet he seldom did so. He looked at the bottle, studying the way the soft glow from the table lamp illuminated the amber liquid; he took a drink.

The other guests had left the wake hours before, and only SG-1 remained, sitting in silence in the emptiness of O'Neill's house. 

"Is it weird that we had the wake at his house?" queried Major Carter, her voice slightly agitated. "Maybe I should have had it at mine. I keep expecting him to walk into the room."

"As do I," Teal'c agreed.

Teal'c knew O'Neill was dead as he carried his body back from the chaos of the ambush on P3X-666. He had stood on the ramp with O'Neill's blood on his hands and clothes while the medical staff swarmed and shouted panicked orders as they maneuvered O'Neill, Doctor Fraiser, and Airman Wells onto gurneys. Major Carter stood beside him and grasped his hand, and Daniel Jackson hovered frantically over Doctor Fraiser without seeing anyone else. "They'll be okay," Major Carter had whispered, and Teal'c could not tell her that O'Neill was already dead.

"It's stupid," Daniel Jackson slurred. "I don't believe in God, gods, any of them. But when Janet got hit, I prayed. I don't know who I thought was listening. Don't let her die. Don't let her die. Nothing else matters, I'll give anything—just don't let her die." He removed his glasses and rubbed his blood-shot eyes. "Do you think someone was listening? What if it was one or the other, Jack or Janet. This is what I gave so she'd live."

"Shut up, Daniel," Major Carter replied. She swayed towards Teal'c, taking the whisky from his hand. "It's not your fault. It's not anybody's fault. It's just one of those things." She took a clumsy swallow from the bottle, whisky spilling down her chin. "Fuck," she whispered, tears coming again to her eyes.

Daniel Jackson stood abruptly and stumbled against the coffee table. "I need to go back to base," he announced. "I need to see Janet."

"It is the middle of the night, Daniel Jackson. You are extremely intoxicated, and Doctor Fraiser will be resting," Teal'c said. He stood, taking Daniel Jackson by the arm and guiding him to the couch. They sat, and Major Carter crawled from her own chair to curl against Teal'c's other side.

"How was I supposed to choose?" Daniel Jackson whispered, his face in his hands. "Jack or Janet. I didn't even know."

Teal'c slowly and rhythmically rubbed his hand across his friend's back. "You are not thinking clearly, Daniel Jackson. There was no choice. It was an accident. You are not to blame." He suspected Daniel Jackson would become more rational when sober; nevertheless, Teal'c worried. He had witnessed Daniel Jackson enduring many trials in the years he had known him, yet never had he seen his friend so broken.

At length, they slept: first Daniel Jackson, his head leaning back and mouth dropping open, then Major Carter, holding Teal'c's hand in both of hers as she rested against his shoulder. Teal'c remained awake for another hour, expecting O'Neill to walk into the room.

***

_Present Day_

Janet left the kitchen with Teal'c and made an effort to socialize, enjoying old friends and meeting new ones. She discovered she liked Colonel Mitchell very much, and soon found herself comparing pecan pie recipes and stories of Southern childhoods with him. And Vala Mal Doran was refreshingly outrageous, if evasive in a way that made Janet wonder what was really behind the obviously false biography she gave.

As the crowd began to thin, Janet grabbed her jacket and escaped to Sam's back porch. The autumn night was crisp but not too cool, and she sat on the back stoop, staring up at the clear Colorado sky. 

"You miss the stars," came the voice behind her. It wasn't a question. She stiffened a little and took a deep breath. 

"Mmm," she replied. "Too many lights in LA. And too much smog."

He joined her on the stoop but sat one step below, looking into the night and not at her. The light from the house illuminated the lines of his back and the hair along his neck that he had grown a bit long for her taste. His face was shadowed by the darkness of the backyard.

"I'm sorry about Nick," she said softly.

He didn't answer for a long beat. "Yeah, well, that's how it goes." He picked up a dried leaf from the step by her foot and began picking the fleshy bits away from the veins. "He asked about you before he died," he offered after a couple of minutes.

"Sam told me."

"Is that why you came?"

"Because Nick asked about me?" She waited a moment, but Daniel didn't answer. "No. It's not why I came."

He twirled the skeleton of the leaf between his fingers. "Things are bad, Janet."

She lifted a hand to touch his shoulder, then thought better of it and stuffed her fist into the pocket of her jacket. "Imminent destruction of the planet bad, or personal bad?" 

"Both. They're sort of the same thing at this point." He dropped the leaf and turned, looking up at her. "But that was always the problem, wasn't it."

She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. "Yeah," she answered. "That was always the problem. Sharing you with the whole galaxy."

He moved his hand to rest on the top of her foot; she could feel its warmth through the thin leather of her shoe. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the railing of the porch. He was quiet a long time, his breathing so slow and even that she wondered if he had fallen asleep. "How have you been?" he asked suddenly, softly.

"Oh, you know. Busy."

"Work?"

"Yeah. Turns out people get sick and die in the real world, too. Though I can usually rule out alien influence."

He almost smiled then, his eyes sliding open to look at her again. "Are you—" he paused, furrowing his brow a little, "seeing anyone?"

She did smile, seeing for the first time in his awkwardness the Daniel she remembered. "No," she replied. "You? Vala seemed quite attentive."

"No, no," he said quickly. "Vala would—that would only end badly." 

Janet nodded. She studied his face—a bit fuller now, with the muscle he'd put on in the past couple of years—and resisted the urge to smooth his rumpled hair. She had come back, come back because of him, because he had asked her to. Yet she could see no further out of their impasse than she had been able to two years before.

"I miss you." His voice was a whisper.

She reached for the hand that still rested on her foot, intertwined her fingers with his. "I know. I miss you too."

***

_Two Years and One Month Before_

Janet held her breath as she watched his face pale, then run the gambit from incomprehension to disbelief to anger to hurt.

"What?" he gasped.

This time she left out resigning her commission, the new job in California, selling the house. "I'm leaving. I can't keep doing this."

"This," he repeated. "This the job this, or," he waved a hand between them and swallowed hard, "this."

She closed her eyes against the threatening tears, inhaled steadily. "Both," she whispered. "I can't separate them."

He stood up from the couch and began to pace, and she wouldn't watch, pinching the bridge of her nose as she stared at her lap and listened to his movements. 

"I just— I don't— Can't we talk about it, Janet?" he burst out. "How long have you been thinking about this? Why didn't you talk to me?"

"I tried," she returned, looking up to where he stood, back to the door, as if he'd physically prevent her from leaving. "After the _Stromos_ I asked you to be more careful. After Honduras I asked you again. And then I nearly died, and I needed you, and you weren't there." He opened his mouth to object but she rushed on, her voice escalating. "Your body was there, sitting in that infirmary chair, but _you_ weren't there. And I get that it was Jack, and I know how much you loved him, and I wanted to understand how it was hurting you and what I could do, and you just shut down."

She stood up, back to him, and walked to the opposite end of the room. It was a bright spring day, sunlight flooding in through the windows, mocking them. She fingered the edge of the curtains, looked out at the neighbors' children kicking a soccer ball in the yard.

"It'll just take some time, Janet. Your injury. Jack. It's—we'll get through this."

She turned to face him. "It's been five months, Daniel. And I realize it doesn't seem that way to you because you spent one of those months frozen in Antarctica, and part of another month mooning about how you couldn't make a one-way trip to Atlantis." A single tear escaped, and she swiped it away angrily. "This relationship is always going to come second to your need to save the world. I get it. I get what's at stake. But I can't sit around and watch anymore, waiting to pick up the pieces, wondering when you'll die next and whether it will be for real."

He looked confused and a bit lost as he pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "You can't be serious about leaving." His voice sounded small, distant. "After all we've been through. I mean, we've made it. All the times we almost didn't, yet here we are. It's like a second chance, and you want to throw it away?"

She inhaled sharply. " _Second_ chance? Do you know how many times you've died, Daniel?"

He blinked. "Um." He paused. "What does that have to do with—"

"Four," she interrupted sharply. "That's no heartbeat, no brain activity, medical death, and yes, I am counting the ascension because we put your body in the ground, goddamnit." She took a breath, challenging him to say something. He was silent. "Then there are the near deaths, of which there have been at least four, depending on how you count them. And don't even get me started on all the times I _thought_ you were dead, or might be dead, or might not recover from whatever alien had decided that it was a good week to fuck around with Daniel Jackson's brain. I haven't quite decided how to categorize this most recent episode. What do you think? Does being frozen in stasis count as actual death or near death? Or maybe it gets a category of its own."

"Janet." He walked across the room toward her, reaching for her hand.

"Don't," she cried, pulling away. He stepped back, watching her, still uncomprehending. She sighed. "We're way beyond the second chance, Daniel. And every time we come back a little more broken. But you don't see it; you just keep barreling on, from one near miss to another. You don't see how it's hurting me. How it's hurting you. And I can't do it anymore. I'm sorry." 

She turned again to look out the window, where the sun shone and the children laughed without any idea what had been sacrificed for them. He came up behind her and placed his hands gingerly on her shoulders. When she didn't move away, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. At least one of them should be crying, she thought, and she wondered why they weren't.

"I love you," he said, and she felt it more than heard it, his throat near her ear and his mouth against her hair.

"I know," she replied. "I love you, too. But it isn't enough."

***

_Present Day_

Her hand felt smaller than he remembered. He had expected to recognize touching her, like returning home after a long stint off-world to find the magazines scattered on the coffee table exactly as he'd left them. Instead, her hand felt too small, her skin colder than it should have been, and he studied their fingers side by side in the darkness and wondered what had changed and when.

He took her hand in both of his and turned it palm up, tracing the lines and creases in her skin. He brought her palm to his lips and kissed it. She inhaled softly as her fingertips grazed his cheek.

"Daniel," she whispered, and he couldn't read the tone.

He was holding on too tightly. She had been the constant in his life for years; even before he loved her he needed her grounding presence. His problem was always one of continuity, a life broken up into pieces, no one seeing the whole of Daniel Jackson. Teal'c and Sam had changed with him, through the years. Mitchell and Vala didn't know any better, assumed that his character was more or less consistent, no matter how many resurrections. And now the one person who had known him as a child and an adult was dead. He clung to Janet's hand.

She shifted closer to him on the porch steps, her free hand pausing briefly at his knee before smoothing his hair. She leaned forward, resting her head on his shoulder, and he could feel her breath against his neck. Slowly, he released her hand and wrapped first one arm, then the other, around her waist. He couldn't quite remember how she fit before and tried not to wonder if this was different.

"Why did you come back?" he asked, half surprised he'd spoken aloud.

Her arm came around his waist, but she didn't answer immediately. "I wanted to see how you were," she finally replied. "I was worried."

"Sam's told you…things." Images from the past two years flashed through his mind: Replicators, Ancients, Ori. Another handful of near misses and miraculous recoveries.

"Some. What she can." He felt her sigh.

"I don't think it's ever going to end," he confessed. "We fight and fight, and as soon as one enemy is defeated there are ten more in its place, and our entire lives become taken over by one unwinnable war after another." He took a deep breath. "I—I understand now why you left."

She lifted her head then and looked at him, her eyes glassy. "I wish it were different," she said.

He kissed her then, and this, finally, was right and familiar, his Janet. She tasted faintly of white wine and then of tears; his hands roamed over her body, his fingers threaded in her hair, and she felt more like home than anything he'd known in years. 

***

And she wouldn't offer to stay, and he wouldn't ask her to. 

But after the Ori's next victory, he called, and she answered. He couldn't talk about it, but she listened anyway, a voice in the darkness, grounding him, reminding him of the person he might have been, giving him hope for another future.


End file.
